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Sep 26, 2022·edited Sep 26, 2022

You missed, as far as I can tell, one key point: by getting a bunch of well-educated kids, many of whom are likely going to end up in the progressive wing of the Democrats, to do something like this…

You’re going to create a medium-sized constellation of driven people within the coalition who support fixing policing but also have an understanding of the realities, sympathy for the people who do the job, and at least a decent idea of what reforms can and can’t work.

This is something that the progressive left just clearly does not have at present.

TL;DR: the important mechanism will be to change the progressive movement, not the police.

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Counterpoint: a TFA model for policing could be a really really bad idea! TFA gives "elite" grads a crash course over the summer in teaching instruction and then throws them into the high poverty areas. Failures in teaching are relatively low profile, while an analogous policing failure would be all over the news. It's pretty easy to imagine a 20-something Yale grad (hi, Milan!) shooting a minority at a traffic stop and it turning into a national story. And policing probably relies a bit more on camaraderie than teaching does (not that teaching doesn't, but you're not in a classroom with another teacher all day long). What happens when the existing police officers start hanging the PFA kids out to dry? Again, pretty easy to imagine.

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Coming at this from a San Francisco perspective, I don't see how this would solve my city's problems.

We have a crime and homelessness problem because:

- the city (and state) chooses not to prosecute most small-ish theft

- drug use isn't prosecuted

As a result, people come to SF from around the country because the weather is nice and they can live in a tent, steal small things for money, and use that cash for drugs, all with relatively little trouble.

I don't think the situation is bad because the cops aren't smart enough.

It's the politicians and policy-makers not understanding the consequences of what they're doing.

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I'd like to see cops having more stringent fitness requirements and requirements for more hand-to-hand combat training.

I'm a squishy, blue-state, center-left liberal that does Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and there are a lot of cops in these classes. One of the things that comes up when I talk to them in the wake of shootings by police (and my gym is in a city with a VERY high-profile police shooting in the last few years, so it has come up a lot, as you can imagine) is that some of them think that some of these officers go to their guns too quickly at least in part because they are worried about being overwhelmed physically in a struggle situation.

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Yes, PFA can be good, but mostly for one reason. I doubt the numbers will suffice to solve staffing shortages or changes the culture in most places . What it will do though, over time, is get young progressives out of their bubble a bit, force them to see the complexity of the world and develop more nuanced views sooner (or ever). Not only would they change, but hopefully they will somewhat influence and change their families and friends (“my brother/roommate in college etc. is/was a cop”). Anything that can help america break out a bit from the polarization trap that makes everyone frankly really really dumb would be very important.

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You should invite Graham Factor onto "Bad Takes" to explain why this would never work.

(This is not a joke. He can be reached at his Substack gmail address even though he's on hiatus.)

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Adam Walinsky, a former RFK aide, had program like that called the Police Corps. Tried for years to get major federal funding—finally got a little. Then fuzzled away. One major problem: police generally hated it. Idea of “better” types of people—college educated etc—coming in to the ranks was offensive, demeaning. Identifying them as some kind of distinctive “corps” may have attracted some different recruits—but understandably alienated everyone else.

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Sep 26, 2022·edited Sep 26, 2022

This all seems fine and correct, but the most successful implementation of this I can possibly imagine seems like it would be the most marginal of marginal reforms. The fundamental problem here, as with many state failures, is that we are vastly over criminalized but under enforced in ways that are absolutely foundational too our model of policing. "Effective" policing in America is entirely about using low level, non-crime offenses to carry out pretextual searches that rightfully violate the 4th amendment. As long as things like traffic violations, disorderly conduct, selling loose cigarettes, and various "possession" statutes are on the books enabling police fishing expeditions, the most cost effective means of policing will be to maximize those fishing expeditions, no matter how well intentioned the patrol officers in question.

Successful reform requires taking pretextual offenses off the books and pouring resources into vastly expanded investigative capacity to meaningfully improve closure rates on things like say car theft, as well as major crimes.

Patrol level policing should be focused almost entirely on minimizing 911 response times.

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I'm pretty skeptical that a significant number of college educated people are going to do want to do a fundamentally blue collar job. Policing involves physical violence, along with vomit and other bodily fluids and general grossness. It requires some degree of courage, at least in a large metro area. You see some of the worst aspects of human behavior. I think this is just fundamentally different from teaching children.

The real reform American policing needs is just more consequences for bad behavior. I'm not 100% sure where I land on making it easier to fire bad cops, but more than anything we need independent prosecutors who are willing to charge obvious crimes by LEOs caught on camera. The solution is mostly just to arrest the bad guys. Part of the FBI's fundamental mission right now includes investigating local corruption (paying off the mayor or alderman for a permit, etc.) It should broaden to explicitly include arresting bad cops given a free pass by their local prosecutor.

As lots of cops & right-leaning people will tell you, the solution to law and order issues is usually just locking up the bad guys. The solution to bad LEO behavior should generally be prosecution, not touchy-feely attempts to make their culture nicer or what have you

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When I was in law school at prestigious public school one of my classmates opted to join the LAPD over working as an attorney. He definitely did so with the ambition to move up through the ranks to leadership in shortish order but it was a very controversial choice but I one that I mostly admired (this was in 1998 and LAPD was still seen as quite a corrupt agency with little respect for civil rights and liberties -- the O.J. verdict is in 1995). Since then I have often thought that there should be a more regularized pathway from legal training not just to being a DA, but also into policing.

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This might work even better if the program had a gender balance requirement. Women cops have been shown to use unnecessary force less often, and their presence probably changes the behavior of their male colleagues as well.

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I'm leery of using police recruitment as social engineering, a way to give elites the "right" ideas about policing. It also has a built-in assumption that elite college grads will do a better, more humane job of wielding a gun than anyone else.

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I am fortunate that I do not have to deal with the police, but among my few interactions were not positive. Someone broke into my car and stole a bunch of things. To be clear: I was dumb. I left my car outside, and had my window cracked open. In a way, you could say I was asking for it. The police showed up, took a report, and then...did nothing. They stole a laptop, and I had the location using the "Find My Apple Device" service and they refused to go. They told me to call if I got another ping (since my ping was several hours old), and when it changed I called the cop. No answer. Called the mainline. No answer. Called again, got someone who said they would resend the officer back to my house to reinterview me before they visit the house. No cop ever came.

The only thing they said was my car license had expired. Not very helpful.

Overall, I respect cops and think they have a thankless job. I go out of my way to appreciate their work. But when they literally do nothing to prevent crime it becomes very difficult to sympathize with them.

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This sounds like a bad West Wing parody.

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I like this, but I don’t think that entrants into a program like this would necessarily need to be sent to high-crime areas for this to be effective. Specifically with regard to the problem of excessive right-wing domination of law-enforcement, having more progressive police anywhere would be a benefit—even if they worked in relatively lower crime areas.

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Sep 26, 2022·edited Sep 26, 2022

I feel this article buried the lede of how out of control American police are. The section is quite something:

"Many if not most departments seem to have a deeply ingrained warrior mentality that emphasizes dominance rather than service. Policing has become so politicized that the overwhelming majority of officers, even in very liberal areas, are right-wing and often seem to have barely disguised disdain for the citizens they nominally serve, and not-at-all disguised disdain for the politicians elected to run their cities"

I get that PFA is the sort of incremental response to that problem beloved by Matt, but it does feel an order of magnitude too small.

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